


Fancy Words

by autoeuphoric (FreezingRayne)



Category: Tales of Xillia
Genre: F/M, Feelings, getting drunk and talking about, oh my
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-28
Updated: 2014-10-28
Packaged: 2018-02-23 01:16:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2528645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FreezingRayne/pseuds/autoeuphoric
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Guilt is an emotion Alvin is thoroughly, intimately familiar with. He’s undressed it and taken it to bed with him. Caressed every inch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fancy Words

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the lovely and beautiful Agonicarts, who turned me into a Leia/Alvin shipper, and who deserves all the sparkly things. 
> 
> Happy birthday, Agony!

She’s sitting slumped at the bar, elbows propping her up. Her hat occupies the stool beside her—an impromptu drinking buddy—and without it her head looks small, the back of her neck surprisingly vulnerable.

Alvin’s been in that position enough times himself to know what it means. Color him surprised. Leia has certainly changed over the last year, but not so much that he would expect to find her drunk at half-past four in the afternoon. He sits down on her other side, leaving the hat its honorary place at table.

He props his chin on his fist. “You come here often?”

“Ha ha.” She picks her head up from the bar. A knot in the wood has left a faint indent in her forehead. It begins to fade right away. There’s no drink in front of her.

Alvin points at the ceiling. “You know, if you want to sleep, we’ve got rooms for the night.”

Leia pulls a face at him. “I wasn’t sleeping! I was thinking.”

“About what?”

“Stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Just…stuff. Things.”

Leia is not usually near this evasive—on the contrary, she has a tendency to over-share. It used to make Alvin uneasy; recently it’s just been comforting.

The day is overcast, and even with the glow of the spyrix lights lining the street outside, its dark enough for the bartender to begin lighting the candles on the tables. Leia, Alvin, and a skinny, sad-eyed man at the far end of the bar are the inn’s only customers.

Alvin waits until the bartender is finished and back behind the counter before he orders a bottle of wine and, after a moment’s deliberation, two glasses.

“Is that for me?” Leia asks as the bartender pours; it’s a red that Alvin has had before. Cheap, but not so cheap as to be undrinkable. As long as don’t have snobby tastes like Gaius or Rowan.

As the bartender goes to open Alvin’s tab, Leia finally smiles. “Buying drinks for underage girls, huh? I thought you were going straight.”

“Straightish. Besides, you’re not underage in Trigleph.”

Leia’s a journalist, so she knows a good argument when she hears one. She takes a small sip, and then a bigger sip.

"Wow, his is really bad.”

Alvin sniffs at it, a little defensive. “It’s fine. And how the heck would you know?”            

He’d been expecting sputtering and coughing. Alvin had found _his_ ownfirst glass of wine disgusting, but he’d drunk the whole thing anyway as a matter of principle. He felt sick for hours afterward.

Leia snorts. “C’mon, Alvin. My parents own an inn. You can’t really think this is the first booze I’ve ever had.”

“Please—of course I knew that.”

It’s all lies. He had been more or less expecting it to be her first drink. He has this tendency, he’s noticed, to assume that everyone around him is far more innocent than they really are.

She’d called the wine bad, but she’s drinking it, profile backlit by the candles. Her hair is bobbed and she does her makeup like most of the girls in Trigleph—bow lips and dark eyes that give weight and definition to faces too young to have it. But Alvin knows Leia doesn’t need makeup for that.

At any rate, she blends in well, much better than any other Rieze Maxians he knows. In another life she’d have made a terrific conman.

He imagines it for a moment. Leia and Alvin, the two of them cutting a swath through Elympios. She’d be the charmer and he’d be the muscle or, hell, the other way around. Taking every town for all its worth before climbing onto the next train without even bothering to check its destination.

“What are you all smiley about?” Leia asks. “Drunk already?”

“Not likely,” he says, but maybe he is. Much easier to explain away the other places his daydream is going. Because sitting here imagining what your teenage friend would look like naked is not something nice guys do when they’re sober. He’s not sure even Old Alvin, the scoundrel, would have gone for a 16 year-old. Sure, he flirts with Jude, but initially that had just been to feel him out (first rule of getting a mark to trust you is divining what they want so you can pretend to give it to them) and now it’s just second nature.

Nearly all of Alvin’s friends are too young for him, and the rest are too old. Not that he’d _want_ to make it with any of them anyway.

And damn, this wine must be stronger than he thought if it’s making him think about this stuff. He squints at the bottle, but the label is all in Xianese.

Leia is doing a much better job at pacing herself, her glass barely half-empty, although her cheeks are rosy and she’s leaning toward Alvin now, as intoxicated people tend to do. Not toward Alvin specifically, just…toward people. People need each other, even if their sober, careful minds tell them they are fine alone.

“You’re quiet,” she says.

The bar is slowly filling up around them, people trickling in for an early date or an after-work drink. Their bartender has been relived by an older guy who looks like he could be her father.

Alvin refills his glass. “So are you.”

“I’m thinking.”

“Jeez. Again?”

“Yeah. You know, some of us do it more than one time in our lives.”

“Ouch, Miss Witticism. Maybe you should be a comedian instead of a journalist.”

Leia takes a sip of wine that is really more like a gulp. “I think my editor would probably agree with you.” Her voice settles into gloom, but she shakes it off quickly. “What about you? What are you going to do if we stop the world from imploding? The same stuff?”

“You mean, will I keep selling fruit?”

The dim lights above the bar cast shadows like spotlights, one on her cheek and one on her hand. “Are you _really_ selling fruit? I mean—it isn’t, like, a euphemism?”

“A euphemism for what?”

“I don’t know.” Leia flushes darker and she fidgets with the stem of her glass. “Something dirty?”

Alvin’s laugh sounds a little drunk as well. “Sorry to disappoint you. Just fruit. Nothing exciting.”

“But why _fruit?_ ”

“Hey, fruit is hot right now! You’re from Rieze Maxia, so you don’t think about it, but fresh produce is really hard to come by in Elympios. People aren’t used to having it. But with the worlds back together again, it’s a good market to corner.” The problem had been in the execution, not the business model. As it turns out, doing everything legit takes a lot of time and effort.

“I feel like I should be taking notes,” Leia says, and it doesn’t even sound like she’s making fun of him. “You never talk about yourself.”

He fumbles his glass a little on the way to his mouth. So much for being smooth. “We had all practically signed up for a suicide mission. I didn’t think I would survive long enough to have to figure out what to do with myself afterward.”

Leia puts her hand on his arm, fingertips points of cold on his wine-hot skin. “Alvin…”

_Fuck,_ but this is getting maudlin. He had sat down to cheer her up, not start whining at her.

“What about you? What made you want to be a journalist?” He tries to slide subtly over to another topic. “Didn’t you want to be a nurse, or something?”

“Yeah, I used to.”

“Because of Jude, right?”

She takes her hand away and sort of shifts back toward her hat, and Alvin wants to grab the words out of the air and shove them back into his mouth. _Idiot._

And hell, when had this _happened_? When had Leia become a girl that he wants to impress, wants to charm?

“You don’t have to answer that,” he says quickly. “None of my business.”

“No, I’m not—.” Leia squints up her eyes. “You’re sort of right. I really did like helping people, I mean, I _do_ like helping people, and being a nurse was an obvious choice. Dr. Mathis’ office was right down the street. And with Jude—.” Her ears are pink and she shakes her hair into her face to hide it, but she keeps going. “I just got so used to being in…in whatever I was with Jude, that it made sense to just…just keep doing that.”

“What changed?” Alvin asks, although he’s pretty sure that the answer is  blond, leggy, and catastrophically powerful.

“Milla. But not in the way you think.”

A rowdy group of boys spills in from the street, students maybe. Trigleph University’s finest. Alvin has to lean in close to Leia to keep listening. This feels strangely important, and he doesn’t want to miss any of it.

“When Milla died…or when we thought she was dead, Jude lost it.”

“I remember.” His eyes had been lifeless, even before Alvin nearly put a bullet between them.

And now guilt wells up like blood from an infected wound. It is an emotion Alvin is thoroughly, intimately familiar with. He’s undressed it and taken it to bed with him, caressed every inch. “You protected him so fiercely. And I—.”

Leia shakes her head. “Stop. I’ve already forgiven you for that. That’s not why I brought it up.

“Jude didn’t eat. He didn’t sleep. Everything I tried to do for him he threw back in my face.”

“Yeah, he was being pretty shitty to you.”

Of course, _he_ hadn’t shot her.

“That wasn’t it.”

“Then what?”

Leia pulls her hat into her lap, fidgeting with the band. “Losing Milla totally destroyed him. At least for a little while. He would have let you kill him. And I just keep thinking about how that wouldn’t have happened to me.”

Alvin drinks more wine and waits for her to go on.

“If Jude died, I would be heartbroken. I would cry and scream and disappear for awhile. But the raw hopelessness in his eyes? I don’t…I don’t think I would feel that.

“And that made me wonder—is that what love is? Knowing that if you lost someone, you would die without them? And if…if I never felt that way about Jude, did that mean I never actually loved him?”

It’s a question now, instead of a story. She is waiting for an answer. Alvin is the absolute worst person to give it to her.

“I don’t think love has to be like that,” he says finally. “It can be, I don’t know, quieter. Just—just there.”

Leia’s laugh is sniffly, but she isn’t crying. “Deep.” Her hand is back on the bar, close enough to Alvin’s to feel the heat of it.           

“Hey, if you want fancy words, you gotta write them yourself.”

 “Okay, I will. I’ll call it _Alvin’s Theories on Love.”_  

“Sounds like a bestseller.”

And, oh fuck, he shouldn’t do it, but he’s going to anyway. Still some scoundrel left in him after all. Girls like that, don’t they? Especially girls like Leia, who’ve got a bit of it themselves. He puts his hand over hers and her fingers lace with his like it's a reflex. Somehow, Leia can still trust enough to take an outstretched hand when its offered.

When he kisses her, though, on her warm, wine-pink mouth, she sputters and grabs for the bar, nearly sliding off the stool.

“W-What are you doing?”

Alvin clears his throat. “I know they say there’s no such thing as a stupid question, but—.” 

  

Leia’s face is splotchy. Shit, she looks mad. “No, I mean—why?”

There are a bunch of things he could say— _because you’re brave and beautiful, and you’ve forgiven me long after I stopped deserving it. You laugh at all the jokes the others don’t. You fit in a little less, just like I do._ All of that would be the truth.

But what comes out is, “Because I really want to, and we’re probably all going to be dead soon anyway.”            

Leia stares at him for a few seconds, blank.

Alvin wishes he had enough wine left to drown himself.

But then she’s laughing so hard she nearly falls off her stool. “Wow, romantic!”  

“I’m a romantic guy.” Is this good laughter, or bad? Is she genuinely amused or planning his demise?

She grabs the front of his jacket for balance and sways toward him. It occurs to Alvin that—no matter what happens—this is a terrible place to do it. Any moment, the others are going to start drifting in for dinner, and if Elle sees them, they’ll never hear the end of it. Gaius will rumble disapproval and Milla will punch him in the head. And Jude…he doesn’t even want to think about that.

But Leia is pushing her hands into his hair, sliding half-off her stool and onto his, and how do you even say no to that?

Instead of going for his mouth, she veers down and buries her face against his neck. “I really like how you smell. Have I ever told you that?”

“Now who’s being romantic?”

Her fingers tighten in his hair. “Shut up.”

Maybe this is wrong, maybe it’s him backsliding, but then again, going around destroying tiny bubble worlds and all the people inside them probably isn’t exactly stand-up behavior either. Most of the decisions Alvin has made in his life haven’t been good ones, but he has still ended up here, alive and surrounded by people he cares about. People who forgive him. 

This time when he kisses her, she doesn’t startle.  


End file.
